2025 Fellows

Savalee Tikle and Romina Cordova’s research centers on textiles as “soft infrastructure,” the cultural, spatial, and economic systems that quietly shape urban and rural life across Mexico. What began as an inquiry into supply chains and material culture shifted, through fieldwork, toward a deeper focus on the social role of textiles, particularly how embroidery and weaving passed through mother-daughter lineages structure women’s autonomy, livelihoods, and intergenerational power… read more.

Miriam Hernandez and Gemrisha investigate the contamination of the Yucatán Peninsula’s karst aquifer by the region’s pork industry, a project that shifted in direction after repeated access to pig farms, from small operations to major producers like Kekén, was denied due to biosecurity protocols and producer wariness stemming from recent regulatory crackdowns…read more.

MCI Fellow Lys Otárola (MUP ’26) presents her 2025 research arguing that the pottery practice of Oaxaca’s red clay communities constitutes a living archive of design intelligence, a system in which social infrastructure, embodied knowledge, communal governance, and ecological reciprocity are not separate concerns but a single, integrated practice. What the pot teaches planning is that the most durable urbanism is not designed from above and delivered downward. It is built from within, through the commons, through craft, through decisions made across generations, with people rather than material at its center…read more.

Fired by heat and shaped by hand, clay carries within it the memory of the landscapes it comes from. Clay is not a traditional material but an active architectural system: a medium whose physical demands organize space, structure economic life, and shape housing futures at radically different scales. This research by MCI Fellow Andrea Martinez traces extraction, craft, labor, and reuse across Oaxaca, Saltillo, and Mexico City. Rather than locating rupture between artisanal and industrial practice, it proposes a material continuum, a framework for understanding how ancestral knowledge is not lost but translated through landscapes, labor, and economies…read more.